Bjarne goes on to say We wouldn’t tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated. We don’t have as an aim that architecture (of buildings) and engineering (of bridges and trains) should become more accessible to people with progressively less training. Indeed, one serious problem is that currently, too many software developers are undereducated and undertrained.

Bjarne made a great understaement the average Bell Labs programmer was significantly more able than most people’s notion of an “average programmer.” Well that could explain why C++ is expert friendly.

But on that point Bjarne is clear that C++ has indeed become too “expert friendly” at a time where the degree of effective formal education of the average software developer has declined. However, the solution is not to dumb down the programming languages but to use a variety of programming languages and educate more experts.

I disagree that more formal education is needed, but we do need to develop more expertise in software development. Personally I have used C++ a lot in the past and was always impressed by the systems that we built using it.